Burn zero

Before anything effective can be done, we first need to look at what has come before. There have been many great movements, they start with good intentions but ultimately fail. Idealism is the spark, desperate people follow, but inevitably a power dynamic generates. Power is addictive, it overwhelms idealistic people and starts to convince them that sacrifices need to be made for perpetuity.

It's a common cycle. The want of power which then corrupts. But past movements did not have technology we have today... The corporate era was fantastic, we now have supercomputers in our pocket delivering us realtime infinite music and movies we have ever wanted. We are at, or past a moment of satiety we have eaten enough, we are leading to what Einstein predicted as an "all-powerful" bureaucracy that leads to the "complete enslavement of the individual". It's time as a planet to rest and digest.

In Plato's Republic, there is the story of the Ring of Gyges which apparently inspired Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It's a thought experiment, Plato postulates if someone were given a ring which makes them invisible they would have to make a binary choice. Either rob a bank or anonymously help a homeless person. Plato's arguments is that the majority of people would choose the former. No one is fully altruistic.

However, what of the opposite? Invisibility was an easy thing to think of, you are there or you aren't, a simple story for its time. But what if the ring did the opposite? i.e. instead of hiding the human being from everyone, it shows everything that is done to everyone. An anti-gyges, it's the principle of CCTV if you are watched, recorded and published openly you are unlikely to do anything wrong. This should be the minimum we expect from someone in political office. If you are in public office, you should disclose all transactions. In practice however, it is very difficult, in Australia this is done, to an extent. Data is published by the AEC, but in a poor format, and there is a glaring loophole, dark money can funnel in if the donations are below $9,000. If a mining company, gambling company or optician company want to have their priorities represented all they need to do is make a shell company which donates several $8,999 donations.

Like tax havens, there are a bevy of lawyers present when transparency laws are put through parliament. Anyone put in any position of power needs to be fully transparent. Once this is in place action can be taken...

Next we need to steer our trajectory in the direction of stable-state economies:

Stage 1

Decorpratise corporates - a key reason for a lot of the unaccounted externalities of our economy is that corporates exist as natural people. There are already many alternatives in existence, co-operatives etc however they have not become the dominant institutions on earth as corporations have an unfair advantage, much the same as China having a police-state advantage over the west. Corporates are computers, machines unfeeling in the pursuit of profit, they are not governed by a hierarchy which tends to select people with narcissistic traits to lead them  in a direction that does not take into account externalities which affect us all.

Ban lobbying - by instigating a law that states that direct sponsorship of political parties is illegal. Political parties can finance campaigns by the use of Democracy Vouchers which are tokens for funds which are evenly distributed by the state to whoever requests them.

Ban pro consumption advertising - #AdvertisingShitsInYourHead

Increase transparency - power corrupts, for anyone to hold power over another they need to commit to being 100% open, this means publically available bank accounts and open email messages.

Religious backing - world religions can make a climate offensive happen. Being good stewards of the Earth and mission work are a big piece of what they do, and planting trees is something even youth groups can do. Can’t fathom why they haven’t taken up this mission already. Local competition would drive a big turnout.

Meet Basic Needs - by transitioning away from carbon-based fuels in the future this will create a basic need gap for the most vulnerable. As such we need to protect people by establishing a firm social foundation—a social guarantee. We need to guarantee universal public healthcare, housing, education, transport, water, and energy and the internet so that everyone has access to the resources they need to live well. And as unnecessary industrial production slows down, we need to shorten the working week to share necessary labour more evenly and introduce a climate job guarantee to ensure that everyone has access to a decent livelihood—with a basic income for those who cannot work or who choose not to. This is the bread and butter of a just transition.

Commission a large electrified train system - which can take on board lorries and other smaller vehicles. So only the last mile is off rail.

Any government that has monetary sovereignty can fund it by issuing the national currency; think of quantitative easing, but this time for people and the planet. This is true for all high-income countries, although for EU countries it would have to be done in a coordinated fashion. The crucial thing is that to prevent any risk of inflation, we also have to reduce the purchasing power of the rich. And that brings us to the next key point.

Tax the rich. Throughout history a populist movement is often used to enact change. Historically this has often been manipulated by scapegoating onto immigrants and marginal groups. The new marginal groups are the 1%, we need to tax the rich out of existence. As Thomas Piketty has pointed out (https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2019/06/11/the-illusion-of-centrist-ecology/), cutting the purchasing power of the rich is the single most powerful way to reduce excess energy use and emissions. This may sound radical, but think about it: it is irrational—and dangerous—to continue supporting an over-consuming class in the middle of a climate emergency. We cannot allow them to appropriate energy so vastly beyond what anyone could reasonably need.

How can we do this? One approach would be to introduce a wealth tax. Make it tough enough that rich people will be incentivized to sell off assets that are surplus to actual requirements. We can also introduce a maximum income policy, such that anything over a certain threshold faces a 100% rate of tax. In addition to cutting excess consumption at the top, this approach will reduce inequality and eliminate the oligarchic power that pollutes our politics.

Stage 2

Burn Zero Carbon - follow the advice of 100 Nobel laureates and several thousand scientists calls for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to do just that: an international agreement to end fossil fuels on a fair and binding schedule. We don't need net zero (reliance on future technology to suck carbon out of the air) we need aim at burn zero. Nationalize the fossil fuel industry and the energy companies, bringing them under public control, just like any other essential service or utility. This will allow us to wind down fossil fuel production and use in line with science-based schedules, without having to constantly fight fossil capital and their propaganda. It also allows us to protect against price chaos, and ration energy to where it’s needed most, to keep essential services going. At the same time, we need to scale down less-necessary parts of the economy in order to reduce excess energy demand: SUVs, private jets, commercial air travel, industrial beef, fast fashion, advertising, planned obsolescence, the military-industrial complex and so on. We need to focus the economy on what is required for human well-being and ecological stability, rather than on corporate profits and elite consumption.

Eating meat license - eating meat is the third worse thing one can do as a consumer.

Contingency stage

One possibility for cooling the earth is to Inject Sulfur into Air. Injecting sulfur into the second atmospheric layer closest to Earth would reflect more sunlight back to space and offset greenhouse gas warming, according to Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego.

Barriers to getting there...

• Deniers - cherry picking small pieces of information and relying on people’s lack of comprehension and capacity for research to sow doubt and uncertainty. One fact which is undoubtable is infinite growth cannot occur indefinitely within a closed system.
• Undermining expertise and intellect - (Goebbals, Gove, Bannon, Farage, Savarola, Trump, Putin) creating division between those who care, and those they care about
• Mercantilist capitalism - capitalism, a great system that has done more to reduce poverty than nearly any other institution, but corrupted and protected by governments in order to allow them to exhaust resources rather than respond to the consequent changes in supply and demand
• First past the post electoral systems - promoting single issue politics (Brexit), and weakening the capacity of smaller parties to campaign for complex longer term issues (understandably seen as secondary)
• Consolidation of the media - I don’t subscribe the conspiracy theories, but 80% of all UK media is controlled by just 4 men - and any economist can tell you the damage done by oligopoly - and any political scientist can appall you with horror stories of what oligarchies do
• Technoutopianism - I’m a fan of a technological solution - but it is a bet and a risky one too - the interrelationships of climate and environment are complex, and the rise of the scientific method over superstition has been incredibly successful in speeding up progress, but it can take a long time, and as you can see from the thermometer below we are already crazily close to the +1.5C increase
• Copyright and patent system - if we could copy the code of FB, Gmail, Youtube and distribute it, we would not have to sit through endless advertising promoting excessive consumption just to connect with one another.
• Undisclosed corporate lobbying - many politicians migrate between private and governmental positions.
• Pro natalism - it's inherent in our culture to have more kids. The best thing you can do for the planet is have 1 or less children.

References